ILLUSTRATION BY JACQUI OAKLEY FOR TIME
‘If the ocean gets
too high, then small
islands will disappear.’
KELLIE K. AGE 8, BROOKLYN
Kate
Marvel
SCIENCE
In blog posts, tweets and
podcasts, Kate Marvel cuts
through misinformation
about climate change with
storytelling. “I don’t see doing
science and talking about the
science as mutually exclusive
things,” she says. In 2013, as
a postdoctoral researcher
with the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, Marvel
helped discover that human
activity has almost definitely
changed global rainfall
patterns. Today she’s an
associate research scientist
at the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies at
Columbia University, where
she recently partnered with
colleagues to study climate
models and tree rings, and
discovered that climate
change has been affecting
drought since 1900. Her
approach to dealing with
climate change might be
best summed up in her 2017
TED talk on the currently
unknown impact clouds could
have on the future of global
weather. “We don’t know for
sure what the future holds.
But we are sending our kids
there, and they are never
coming back,” she said. “I
want them to be prepared for
what they’ll face.”
ÑJasmine Aguilera